Introduction: This article is translated from the Vox article “The modern family” by Emily VanDerWerff. This article is part of Vox's Family Issue series, which describes how some people in modern society make choices about family that differ from the nuclear family structure: under distance, estrangement, and pressure, some people leave their birth families and choose their own families. Some individuals in this article requested not to use their last names so they could freely discuss estrangement, abuse, and complex relationships within families. The content of the article does not represent the translator's views. It should also be noted that the translator uses the term “佗 (tā)” as a third-person pronoun for transgender individuals.
The rules are simple.
Stephanie Drury drew a line with her mother: do not shame me. Stephanie does not allow her mother to shame her—whether it’s about her hair, her wardrobe, or how she raises her children. If her mother shames her, Stephanie will stop talking to her.
But this line doesn’t hold for long. Whenever they talk, Stephanie’s mother always finds some reason to shame her daughter. Stephanie would cut off contact for a month or two, then feel guilty and start calling her mother again. Even when her mother promises to do better, she ultimately slips up again. Stephanie is the same: she would cut off contact again, feel guilty, reconcile, and repeat the cycle.
Eventually, after a year of this back and forth, Stephanie’s husband asked if she and her parents would be willing to have a mediated conversation to improve their overall relationship. They enlisted a trusted pastor friend to mediate. When the pastor emailed to ask if they would be willing to participate in the discussion, Stephanie’s mother seemed to interpret the request for a meeting as an invasion of family. She replied, “Stephanie has decided not to talk to us anymore, which is too bad. I’m very sad that Stephanie made this decision, and we will never see our grandchildren again.”
“There were others who witnessed the mental turmoil I endured growing up, and I felt some solace,” Stephanie said, a risk analyst in Seattle. “At the time, my emotional reaction was very intense. I kicked a hole in the wall. I finally felt it. As my therapist said: ‘Your conscious brain has finally accepted what your unconscious brain has always known, which is that your parents have always had the ability to lose you. Your life should always be managed by them.’”
That was 15 years ago, and since then, Stephanie has not contacted her parents. At that time, her oldest child had already left for college, and her youngest is now in high school. During that time, Stephanie’s siblings also tried to set similar boundaries with their parents but were similarly rejected; they too have not contacted their parents since. During that time, Stephanie learned to rebuild her self-esteem, her beliefs, and her self-awareness, seeking new versions of these psychological paradigms that were not imposed by her parents.
When Stephanie finally cut her parents out of her life in 2006, she wasn’t ready to articulate her reasoning for that decision. Even the word “boundary” hadn’t yet become part of her vocabulary. Slowly but surely, she entered a larger community—both in real life and online—where people cared for her with love and support.
“Now I have boundaries everywhere, ‘I don’t care if you’re family; you can’t talk to me like that.’ I think that’s great,” she said. “It’s sad not to grow up in love. But finding loving people also brings joy and hope. There are loving people everywhere. They don’t have to be your blood relatives.”
In 2021, we are more or less aware of concepts like toxic relationships and gaslighting, which can distort family relationships and even make them feel sinful. Many people understand the concept of setting boundaries and recognize that the idea of family can be flexible enough to include beloved friends. These concepts are not new, but the language we use to discuss them often feels cold, allowing us to face those incredibly painful experiences from a distance. This language sounds accurate; it reflects an inaccurate idea we all know deep down: sometimes, family is not worth cherishing.
But what do we mean when we say this? What, after all, is family?
Here’s a possible answer: your family consists of those who raise you and those you grow up with. Generally speaking, you are with them from the moment you are born, but sometimes you are adopted at a younger age. This concept of family can take on dozens of different versions, but its core remains the same: the nuclear family unit.
This definition of family derives from our cultural, storytelling, and religious traditions over the past few centuries and has received official support from government policies in most countries, including the United States. Just think of how many sitcoms end with an elder of a family reminding their children (and thereby telling us, the audience): family comes first, and your family will never let you down. The unshakeable primacy of the family unit is one of the earliest metaphors we learn.
But this concept has significant limitations.
At the core of this idea is obligation. Certain obligations are necessary for society to function effectively; parents either need to care for their children or find someone else to do so. But other obligations are more chaotic and more easily abused. “Your parents raised you, so you can never repay them” is theoretically correct, but once you consider that some parents do not care about their children’s best interests, this theory begins to crumble. Similarly, if one family member abuses another, then “family first” becomes a terrifying concept; because under this concept, the primary goal of action is to maintain the family, not to rescue the victim.
But these harmful situations do not necessarily lead us to evolve our definition of family. In an era where the only way to find work is to leave your hometown for the city, many families (even good families) find it difficult to maintain vibrant family relationships over long distances. Gradually, for those of us far from home, our nearby friends begin to fill roles similar to family, even if we have never defined them that way.
In American culture, there exists another family model: one where family members are composed of non-relatives. For a long time, queer chosen families have become an alternative family choice outside the nuclear family structure. The structure of queer families is looser but supports each other in a family-like way, although more queer families also tend to follow the nuclear family structure of two parents raising children. While the evangelical church, which dominates much of American politics, actively works to enforce a stricter definition of family, this looser definition of chosen families has begun to emerge.
In 2019, Daniel faced a crisis just before the holidays. He had a falling out with the evangelical church he had been part of since childhood, and during therapy (aimed at helping him cope with the complex emotions surrounding the fallout), he began to reveal the childhood sexual abuse he suffered in his hometown. He called his parents to say he was undergoing some intensive therapy and that he and his wife would not be coming home for the holidays but would visit them in a few months. Before that, he had a good relationship with his parents, but he began to feel that this relationship was based only on joyful gatherings rather than anything substantial.
“They never asked what was going on. They never went further than just saying, ‘Whatever space you need, you can have it,’” Daniel said (he asked Vox not to use his real name for fear of family retaliation). “My father eventually sent me an email saying, ‘Hey, don’t send us emails about when you think you might be ready to talk to us. When you’re ready to reconcile, come back and talk to us.’ There was no ‘What happened? Are you okay?’ I found that very unreasonable, and to me, it meant they wanted to avoid a lot of trouble.”
Daniel and his wife are both cisgender and are in a heterosexual marriage. But after he fell out with his family, they found the greatest support and comfort came from their queer friends, especially a lesbian couple who lived a few blocks away in Chicago. The more time Daniel spent with these queer friends, the more support and safety he found, which he felt was lacking in his family.
“Finding chosen or chosen families is not a concept unique to the queer community, but it is closely associated with them. In the mid-20th century, queers who had moved to big cities began to form ersatz family structures, which resemble traditional nuclear families but are not entirely the same. In 1991, Kath Weston wrote in her landmark book Families We Choose: the concept of queer chosen families arises from the migration of gay men and women to specific cities. They are often rejected by their birth families, but sometimes they just choose to leave. And once they arrive in cities like San Francisco, they form tight bonds with other queers around them. Of course, they would. Why wouldn’t they? That’s human nature.
During the AIDS crisis, queer chosen families became especially important as gay men (especially gay men) cared for each other during this time filled with death and sorrow. These men often had completely severed ties with their birth families, but they still sought care, compassion, and love—things people typically expect from family.
In the late 20th century, especially during the AIDS crisis, legal recognition of these families became a major concern for many queers, particularly how to incorporate queer families into existing legal frameworks. After all, if the person you love dies alone in a hospital, or if a runaway teenager from a homophobic birth family is to be returned to their so-called “home,” wouldn’t you want equal legal rights as a spouse or parent?
Weston’s book recognizes that while chosen families and nuclear families can meet many of the same emotional needs, there are still many differences between them. Due to these differences, the existence of chosen families itself threatens the core assumptions of family definitions. Weston wrote:
Isn’t it reasonable to say that gay families are another alternative form of family within the broader “American kinship”? Since any alternative must replace something, in this statement, the alternative replaces the core paradigm of family shared by most people in society. In America, the nuclear family clearly represents a privileged structure, rather than just one of the legally equivalent family forms.
In fact, as queers become more accepted in American society, our ability to adapt to the nuclear family framework is also increasing. In 2021, I can quite easily marry another woman. In California, we can even relatively easily adopt a child together. Both of these things were difficult or even impossible to do 40 years ago. However, for queer family forms like triads or polyamorous families, legal recognition for collective child-rearing still receives very little resources.
“Now, many older generations and families are quite accepting of basic forms of queerness. But when you start to think about forms of sexual identity and sexual practices that are still considered marginal or abnormal or somewhat unhealthy in mainstream society, you inevitably think of those situations that people cannot accept,” said Aren Aizura, an associate professor of gender, women, and sexuality studies at the University of Minnesota.
“Queers and trans workers have played a significant role in building queer communities because they cannot be honest with their birth families while doing sex work,” Aizura explained. “This is similar to the kink community. So if this is part of your everyday life but difficult to disclose to family, then you have to organize a broader and more comprehensive version of a queer family. When you get sick, who do you call? When do you need someone to bring you food? When do you need help splitting rent? For sex workers, it’s often the case that sex workers help each other.
Aizura added that idealizing queer chosen families is tempting, but in some cases, chosen families can also breed toxic relationships and abuse. Poor treatment of one another and spreading one’s own pain is not exclusive to cisgender heterosexuals. We all have that capacity. Because queer chosen families are often composed of those rejected by their birth families, and their process of severing ties with family is often accompanied by pain or even trauma, these individuals may reenact those traumas in spaces that should be used to escape trauma.
Queers often have traumatic pasts, but this also makes them particularly suited to discuss and cope with those pasts. And as the collective consciousness of coping with traumatic pasts enters mainstream American society, the concept of chosen families among queers has also entered the mainstream. As queer families gain more legal protections, and as our family structures replicate nuclear family structures, cishet individuals are also considering forming families through especially close friends, not just their birth families.
“When friends become more than just good friends but turn into relationships you and they are willing to call chosen family, then the responsibilities to each other (including communication, staying in touch, and caring) change, and in a very good and meaningful way,” Daniel described the evolving relationship between him, his wife, and their friends. “But the big things in life also change. If my wife and I decide to move and don’t discuss it with these guys, the outcome will be very different from what would happen with other close friends… We joke with our chosen family, ‘How dare you move without discussing it with us?’”
Mainstream society is evolving toward a tolerance for chosen family structures, largely thanks to the tireless efforts of the queer community; while at least in the United States, the evangelical church stands on the other side, trying to pull culture back to a stricter patriarchal family. Although this social divide is more pronounced in the lives of queers, it also affects many non-queer populations.
I have interviewed dozens of people who are estranged from their families and who feel that chosen family structures suit them better. In almost all conversations, the evangelical church or similar conservative religious traditions appeared, with only a few exceptions.
“I thought for about 25 years that I couldn’t say anything bad about my parents, or I would be shaming them in some way. As a child, a Christian, that was the way to please God. Whatever your parents tell you to do, you do,” Daniel said. “I was a very lively child from 0 to 6, but then I became a self-absorbed person. As I grew older, some of my liveliness faded. But that sense of self-absorption was reinforced by the religious voices in the church. So even if things were bad, you couldn’t say it. Therefore, my experience over the past two years has been about finding the voice I never had in my family to speak up for myself or protect myself. In that religious social atmosphere, children cannot speak up for themselves.”
White evangelicals in America (especially upper-class white evangelicals) are still constrained by strict family structures, where husbands hold supreme authority over wives, and parents hold supreme authority over children. The phenomenon of abuse in a culture is often related to the patriarchy within that culture, and in recent years, American evangelical Christianity has been plagued by numerous scandals that indicate that abuse within specific churches and among evangelicals is more widespread. (A recent case is the ongoing revelations of widespread sexual assault issues at Liberty University.)
Moreover, evangelical culture views the family unit as the core social organizational structure of our lives, says Kristin Kobes Du Mez, a history professor at Calvin University and author of Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation. Clearly, in most people’s lives, family is the core social organizational structure, but within evangelicals, the primacy of family even surpasses that of government or church. This belief system makes it difficult for children raised in abusive families to receive much help.
“The worst-case scenario is that the church might intervene. So you have to bring all family issues to the church and resolve them through elders, who are all men in these churches,” Du Mez said. “So if you’ve suffered sexual abuse or domestic violence, members of these communities will be strongly discouraged or even ordered not to inform the police or any advisors outside their religious community.
But in chosen family structures, there is often a lot of discussion about trauma-informed parenting and experiences of rejection from birth families; at least in America, these discussions are the foundation for the queer community to build unmasked dialogue spaces.
“It’s really helpful to see what real love looks like,” said Dianna Anderson, a writer from Minneapolis, who became estranged from her father after he voted for Donald Trump knowing she had a queer child. (Situations of family estrangement due to Trump are not uncommon.) “Growing up in an evangelical background, we were often told that love is being nice to someone, even if you have bad thoughts about them, and not telling them, which can turn into some kind of gaslighting. And in the best queer communities, the way to show love is to support your identity, to understand you as a whole person, and not to dissect you superficially.
Many have written about the divide between queers and evangelical America, and some surveys show that a major reason for the decline in evangelical church membership is opposition to queer identities. Ironically, the alternative family structures Weston wrote about in 1991 have now become a counter-form to white evangelical patriarchal families. The tension between these two family structures may become increasingly concerning.
However, a major driving force behind our redefinition of family is often favored by conservative evangelicals. That is modern capitalism.
One major reason for the growing distance between family members is physical distance. When people live far apart geographically, it becomes increasingly difficult to maintain close emotional ties. Once geographical distance is created, it often provides people with more mental space to think about the toxic relationships in their birth families. In the modern world, more and more people are moving away from their birth families, often due to jobs in big cities, sometimes at considerable distances.
Ale grew up in a conservative Catholic community in Romania. But when they left home for college, they chose England, where they could finally begin to seriously explore their gender identity. The physical distance from their family also fostered emotional distance.
Now, over a decade later, Ale is in their early 30s and maintains a relationship with their parents, but the person in that relationship is not their true self. They rarely see their parents, and when they talk on the phone or via video, their parents speak to them in a way they take for granted. They are not actually talking to their real child because Ale is unwilling to discuss their life with their parents. Thus, their relationship has grown distant.
“We talk on FaceTime once a week for about 15 to 20 minutes, and I probably ask them the same things; I don’t say anything about my life,” Ale said. “‘Yes, work is really busy. I’ve been busy. Life is fine. The cat is here; isn’t it cute? I’m going to meet some friends. We’re going out.’ That’s it. I won’t explain anything further.”
Can you call this estrangement? Strictly speaking, no. Ale still dutifully talks to their parents from time to time. But their pursuit of a life that embraces their non-binary identity has created a chasm between them and their parents, and their parents don’t even know that chasm exists. Ale has considered coming out to their parents but feels it would lead to a rupture in their relationship.
From my understanding, this kind of not-estranged estrangement is much more common than a complete severance of family ties. For example, I no longer talk to my parents, but I spent a lot of time as an adult dutifully calling them from time to time to discuss trivial matters. When I tried to have an honest discussion with them about my transition, our relationship broke down because my parents would rather choose an imaginary son than accept the daughter they actually have. But even before that, our relationship didn’t really exist because I wasn’t honest with my parents or myself. We were performing family rituals without valuing genuine connection.
People don’t need to create gaps between family members simply because of physical distance to embrace queer identities. Maintaining long-distance relationships is challenging, even in modern times with instant communication. You are more likely to form intimate relationships with those you see often, and you are more likely to see those who live close to you.
Thus, the simple act of moving is a major reason for our modern redefinition of family. Modern capitalism has diminished the value of rural and suburban areas, siphoning more and more children raised in those places to big cities, especially coastal areas. If you, like me, moved from South Dakota to Los Angeles, you can feel the impact of your hometown slowly fading. Capital accumulates in coastal areas, so children go there while parents are left behind. This leads to relationship breakdowns.
When neither parents nor children actively try to maintain positive relationships, this shift does not merely result in a slow erosion of parent-child relationships. If you grew up in an abusive family structure a hundred years ago, you would have had little choice but to accept it, more or less, and see it as normal. When you leave that structure and move away, you may discover and realize that the family environment you grew up in was actually terrible. When you are half a continent away from toxic family members, it is much easier to set boundaries with them because physical distance itself can serve as your ultimate boundary.
Stephanie’s children are now at an age where they could choose to cut her out of their lives—if they want to. She expects they won’t. She hopes they won’t. She believes her relationship with them is good. But her own experiences with her parents make her believe she owes her children a lot, while her children owe her very little.
“A counselor once told me, ‘You don’t owe your parents anything.’ And when she said that to me, I found it hard to grasp at the time. She then said, ‘Well, you can look at it this way: do you think your children owe you anything?’ And I immediately said, ‘No! Definitely not!’” Stephanie said. “As a parent, what you really need to do is be good enough. But to be good enough, at the very least, is to treat your children as equals, as people, rather than expecting them to deal with your narcissistic injuries.”
Although the details vary, we all grew up in a culture that insists on family supremacy—your family will always support you, and your worst wrongdoing is to betray your family.
But we also know this is so untrue. We know there are countless ways families can break down, and even the most loving families can have moments of stagnation. But we have no reason to completely abandon the idea of family. Of course not. But perhaps we can expand the definition of family from “those related to me” to “those who show up first, who support me forever, and whom I will never betray.”
Or, more simply: sometimes, your family is not your family, and that’s okay.
So perhaps there is a better model for constructing family. I asked those interviewed in this article who are estranged from their birth families: what characteristics are most important for defining family? To my surprise, no one said love. Instead, the most common theme was safety—a place where you can be yourself without fear, without worrying about the consequences.
“It sounds very sentimental, but: who makes you feel at home? Family should feel like home. There are certainly some people who resonate with me and make me feel safe. Not all friends, but some of them,” Stephanie said. “And I’m learning to guide my life more and more by that. Your intuition is never wrong.”